Canada's New Seal Hunt Season Has Familiar Problems: Big Quotas, Little Logic
By Dr. Naomi Rose

The 2003-2004 Canadian seal hunting season starts on November 15. From that day until May 15, anyone with a license—and they are all too easily obtained—will be allowed to club or shoot harp and hooded seals to death on the ice off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland in what has become the largest commercial slaughter of wildlife anywhere.

Canada's government likes to frame the seal hunt as part of its historic past as well as a viable management tool, but recent international protests, including the Protect Seals campaign, have worked hard to put the slaughter in its proper context.

Embarrassed by the international criticism, the Canadian government has vehemently denied charges that the hunt targets seal pups, but that government's own figures show that 96.6% of the 286,238 seals reported killed during last year's hunt were between 12 days and 12 weeks old. It's the only major hunt, anywhere in the world, to target young animals. Not much to be proud of. Want to learn more?
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Even more shameful is the hunt's wastefulness and cruelty. Although the government sets quotas, the limits seem like mere suggestions, since the quotas have not been vigilantly enforced. "Struck-and-lost" seals (those mortally wounded but not recovered) are not counted against the quota. If struck-and-lost animals were considered, the total kill each year would almost certainly exceed half a million seals.

What's more, although the government claims to enforce a policy of humane killing, a recent report by an international team of veterinarians determined that Canadian regulations regarding humane killing were neither being respected nor enforced. The team decided that the seal hunt failed to comply with Canada's basic animal welfare regulations because, among other things, a disturbing number of seals (as many as 42%) probably were skinned while alive and conscious.

Canada is entering the second year of its new three-year "management plan" for harp seals, which many scientists agree will be disastrous for the North Atlantic harp seal population. The plan, devised by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Ocean (DFO), allows sealers to kill 975,000 harp seals over three years. In two of those three years, sealers may kill as many as 350,000 harp seals. Many have questioned why the Canadian government would raise the quota when the previous quota, 275,000 seals a year, was not only unsustainable, but also flagrantly violated by sealers.

The Canadian government justifies the continued rampant killing of seals—and its own indirect financial support of the hunt—by pointing to collapsed cod stocks. Rather than actually blaming seals for the decline in cod, the government allows sealers to do the talking: There are "too many" seals who have voraciously helped to wipe out the codfish stocks in the North Atlantic, the sealers say at every opportunity.

Instead of backing that particular claim, the government maintains that seals have contributed to the failure of the cod to recover to their former numbers. These arguments unfortunately appeal to many people who make a living from the ocean, but they are absurd.

Seals—probably in greater numbers than today—and cod co-existed for millennia before factory fishing vessels appeared on the scene. Over-fishing has caused the crash of North Atlantic cod. Even scientists with Canada's DFO acknowledge this fact.

As for the government's claim that the presence of seals is preventing the cod stock's recovery, well, ecosystems aren't that simple: Seals not only eat cod, they eat predators of cod; therefore, removing seals from the ecosystem may actually impede cod stock recovery.

Again, the DFO's scientists have cautioned the government that there is no evidence that removing seals from the ecosystem will help recover the cod. What will help the cod is a new policy in which the government stops issuing quotas to fishermen as a political sop to this vocal constituency.

Seals are a convenient scapegoat for the moment. Allowing fishermen to kill more seals may sound like a way to help them make a living now that factory fishing of cod has robbed them of that livelihood, but substituting an unsustainable hunt for an unsustainable fishery won't solve the problem. The only justification for the seal hunt, then, is political. And when natural resources are managed by politics rather than by science, wildlife, habitat, and people suffer.

The Canadian seal hunt is an anachronism whose time has past. The government should focus its energies and funding on diversifying the economy of Atlantic Canada—people would spend far more money to travel to Newfoundland to view live seals breeding on the ice than they would pay for seal jerky or even a seal-skin coat. Canada needs to move out of the past and into the 21st century and modernize its resource management, its economies, and its attitudes. It is time to end the hunt.

Dr. Naomi Rose is The HSUS's marine mammal scientist.

Copyright © 2004 The Humane Society of the United States. All rights reserved.